neighborhood · official boundary
Back Bay
An official neighborhood of Boston, as bounded by the Boston Planning Department — 399 acres. This is the official layer: the boundary an authority drew. What people call this place, and where they say it reaches, are filed separately as attested claims.
The official boundary of Back Bay as promulgated by the Boston Planning Department.
Place
official layer
An official boundary, promulgated by an authority with the power to draw it. It is not amended by anything on the vernacular layer.
- Filed by this archive as
- neighborhood
- Authority
- Boston Planning Department
- Within
- Boston
- Area
- 1.62 square kilometers
- Boundary
- held as GeoJSON at
/asset/7100562efb797bf5739a19dc998b3555/back-bay.geojson— 26877 bytes, exactly as accessioned
Map
image/svg+xml at /asset/3c4104959bc23f2513d090adade342be/back-bay.svg — 2342 bytes, SHA-256 3c4104959bc23f25… · Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0The exact coordinates are held separately as
/asset/7100562efb797bf5739a19dc998b3555/back-bay.geojson (application/geo+json, 26877 bytes, SHA-256 7100562efb797bf5…). The map is simplified for drawing; the boundary is not.Questions this record answers
Each answer is composed only from fields this record carries, and names the attestation for what it says. A question the record cannot answer from its own attested content is not asked here. Where a boundary is described as official it was promulgated by an authority with the power to draw it and is not amended by anything on the vernacular layer; where it is described as vernacular it is held by attestation alone and amends no official boundary.
Where is Back Bay, and what kind of boundary does the archive hold?
Back Bay is recorded as a neighborhood, within Boston. The archive holds its boundary on the official layer: promulgated by an authority with the power to draw it.
Attested by: Boston Planning Department neighborhood boundaries, retrieved 2 September 2026, under Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0.
Who drew the boundary of Back Bay?
Boston Planning Department promulgated it. A boundary with no promulgating authority is an assertion rather than a fact, and this archive files those separately, as claims.
Attested by: Boston Planning Department neighborhood boundaries, retrieved 2 September 2026, under Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0.
How large is Back Bay?
1.62 square kilometers, computed from the boundary the archive holds and not quoted from elsewhere.
Attested by: Boston Planning Department neighborhood boundaries, retrieved 2 September 2026, under Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0.
What does the archive's map of Back Bay show?
A static map of the boundary, rendered by the archive on a server and never in a reader's browser, served as image/svg+xml at /asset/3c4104959bc23f2513d090adade342be/back-bay.svg. The exact coordinates it was drawn from are served separately as application/geo+json at /asset/7100562efb797bf5739a19dc998b3555/back-bay.geojson.
Attested by: Rendered by archive-ingest 0.1.0 from the boundary this archive holds; digest 3c4104959bc23f2513d090adade342be72071b2cd5eb08d399adba8a43f45710.
What else does the world call Back Bay?
The archive reconciles this record to Wikidata (Q141690); English Wikipedia (Back_Bay,_Boston). Each identity carries the method that produced it. 1 further candidate was considered and refused, and it is named on this page under “candidates the archive declined”, each with its own reason — a decision nobody can see is indistinguishable from never having looked.
Attested by: Q141690 — Q141690 — label "Back Bay", classed as neighborhood in Boston, historic district, decided 3 September 2026 by archive-ingest 0.1.0. Back_Bay,_Boston — schema:about Q141690 ; schema:isPartOf en.wikipedia, decided 3 September 2026 by archive-ingest 0.1.0
What does the archive hold for Back Bay, and under what license?
The Boston Archive holds this record of Back Bay from Boston Planning Department neighborhood boundaries, retrieved 2 September 2026, under Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0 (public domain). 4 recorded transforms stand between the retrieved bytes and this record. Attribution is due to Boston Planning Department.
Attested by: Boston Planning Department neighborhood boundaries, retrieved 2 September 2026, under Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0.
This record, elsewhere
Identities the archive asserts, each named with the method that produced it. Candidates the archive did not assert here are held in the reconciliation ledger and are shown below, under candidates the archive declined, and in the reconciliation ledger. Each method is stated in full — the procedure, the value it was compared against, and the date it was decided — in this record's machine rendering.
- Wikidata —
Q141690Method: label-type-geography (point inside the boundary) · Matched against: Q141690 — label "Back Bay", classed as neighborhood in Boston, historic district · Decided 3 September 2026 - English Wikipedia —
Back_Bay,_BostonMethod: wikidata-sitelink · Matched against: schema:about Q141690 ; schema:isPartOf en.wikipedia · Decided 3 September 2026
Candidates the archive declined
Identities that were considered and not asserted. They are published here rather than merely filed, because a decision nobody can see is indistinguishable from never having looked. A candidate is DECLINED where the archive weighed it and refused it, and HELD where the archive asserts it nowhere on this record — most often because it is asserted on the archive's principal record for the same place, and asserting it twice would instruct a consumer to merge two records the archive deliberately keeps apart. Each row states which, in its own words. A wrong sameAs is worse than none. Every verdict is in the reconciliation ledger.
- Wikidata —
Q3675991· declinedMatched against: rdfs:label / skos:altLabel = Back Bay stationWhy: name agrees but type does not: this record is filed in this archive's `neighborhood` class, and Q3675991 is classed on Wikidata as railway station, metro station, underground stationMethod: label-type-geography within the P131=Q100 candidate pool · Decided 3 September 2026
Related records
- located in — Boston
Identity
- Identifier
- urn:lemay:boston:entity:back-bay
- Canonical URL
- https://boston.fyi/place/back-bay
- As JSON
- https://boston.fyi/place/back-bay.json
- Version
- 1 · last changed 2 September 2026
Provenance
- Source
- Boston Planning Department neighborhood boundaries — source of record
- License
- Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0 (public_domain)
- Retrieved
- 2 September 2026
- Source identifier
- 2
- Attribution
- Boston Planning Department
- Rights as stated
- Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL)
Transform ladder
| # | Operation | Description | Tool |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | fetch | retrieved the official neighborhood boundaries as GeoJSON from the City of Boston open-data portal | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 2 | reproject | the source is already WGS 84 (EPSG:4326); the geometry was set to that SRID and multi-cast without alteration of coordinates | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 3 | normalize | the feature's name became the record title; the boundary was written to the official layer with the promulgating authority named | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 4 | externalize-boundary | The boundary left the inline page graph and became two preserved holdings: the exact coordinates at /asset/7100562efb797bf5739a19dc998b3555/back-bay.geojson and a static map rendered server-side at /asset/3c4104959bc23f2513d090adade342be/back-bay.svg. The stored geometry is unchanged; the record graph now addresses it instead of carrying it. | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |